In this episode of The Western Standard, I talk to Dan McTeague about the carbon tax, the Alberta government's response to the federal government's carbon tax and what the Supreme Court of Canada has to say about it.
00:00:30.000Good day. Welcome to the Corey Morgan Show. I am indeed Corey Morgan. This is my hour every week with the Western Standard where I cover some news, get some ranting out and talk to interesting guests who offer us insight on all sorts of issues. And today is no exception is a good show. I got Dan McTeague coming on a little while. He's with Canadians for Affordable Energy, or you might know more for gasbuddy.com.
00:00:58.820He did a lot of work as, you know, pointing people in the right direction to find good prices at the pump for gasoline and a lot of work analyzing fuel prices, energy prices, things such as that. And of course, it's a big issue going on right now.
00:01:12.520As well, I put that as the afterthought. He was actually a liberal member of parliament back in the day. These were pre-Trudeau days. And if you've seen Mr. McTeague's commentary these days, he's not a big fan of the Trudeau liberals. He's of more of the old stock when liberals were still somewhat sane versus the ideological lunatics we have under Prime Minister Hammerhead.
00:01:35.440So let's get on to speaking of, you know, the actions of Prime Minister Trudeau and some of the things his government has done and some of the stuff that's really been hitting the fan out in the West lately this week.
00:01:47.660So the words, her words were loaded and uncompromised. So when the Western Standards, Nigel Hannaford at a press conference the other day asked Premier Daniel Smith what she will do to fend off the proposed federal incursion into Alberta's jurisdiction with electrical generation,
00:02:04.120she finished her answer basically saying, we will go our own way. That's her own words.
00:02:09.760Now, Smith isn't saying the government's going to pursue an independence referendum in Alberta anytime soon, but she's well aware too that her statement left room for people to take that as an unspoken threat.
00:02:20.420Alberta's premier is an experienced and skilled communicator. Her choice of words was no mistake.
00:02:25.740Now, in the near future, Alberta will go its own way with the current plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050, no matter what Ottawa thinks.
00:02:32.800The goalposts, though, are 15 years apart, whereas, you know, Gilboa wants to reach that goal at 2035.
00:02:41.560And there's little indication that Gilboa or Smith are willing to even entertain the notion of changing their targets.
00:02:46.740So this battle is just beginning. Now, Gilboa is following the typical liberal playbook.
00:02:51.020He's slapping down the West to win support in the East.
00:02:54.400The net zero electric generation targets are going to be easily met in Ontario and Quebec,
00:02:58.000where they're rich in hydroelectric resources and they have nuclear reactors.
00:03:02.800The 2035 net zero target for Alberta, though, is utterly impossible to reach without crippling Alberta's economy and threatening domestic energy security.
00:03:11.560Right now, fossil fuel supplies almost 80 percent of the province's energy needs.
00:03:15.460And that can't change that much in 12 short years.
00:03:18.740The province has no major rivers to dam.
00:03:20.960And the way Canada works, it would take decades to get a large scale nuclear power generation plant up and running if it was ever even approved.
00:03:28.300I mean, despite years and billions in investment in solar and wind generation projects,
00:03:32.460they still only supply a small percentage of the Alberta power grid.
00:03:35.680And they'll always need to be backed up with gas generators for the days when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.
00:03:47.560Well, this battle's surely going to head to Canada's courts and it'll move at the typical glacial pace.
00:03:52.480So it's going to be a war fought in slow motion with plenty of heated rhetoric as the challenges creep through the system.
00:03:59.800Eventually, the Supreme Court will rule on the dispute and it will rule in favor of the Liberal government.
00:04:05.360I mean, the Constitution's little more than a set of suggestions when it comes to protecting Alberta's constitutional authority and jurisdiction and energy generation.
00:04:13.280We established that when the Supreme Court upheld the carbon tax.
00:06:02.100I'm doing okay, Corey. How are you handling the heat?
00:06:05.180Oh, I like it. I love heat. Bring it on.
00:06:08.340I thought you were more of a winter guy.
00:06:10.560No, I despise winter. Jane likes the cooler weather, yes. You've heard me whine about winter enough to know how much I hate it.
00:06:17.520I had a laugh this week on some of the other media's headlines where it's, oh, heat warning, you know, temperatures to soar, take precautions.
00:06:26.280It's going up to 30 degrees, and it's summer. Like, what do people expect? It's summer.
00:06:32.200Well, it seems this is the first time ever. I mean, they act like it, don't they?
00:06:35.240I remember many 30-degree days when I was a kid, too. I'd still be kicked out of the house and have to deal with it. I survived.
00:06:41.400Exactly. Come back when the sun's going down.
00:06:43.980One group of people, Corey, that's not having a very good time this summer right now is in the Northwest Territories, and that's where some of our news focus has been this morning.
00:06:56.320And RCMP charged some kids starting an arson fire up there, and that's sort of continuing along the way that Alberta went and parts of B.C. where all these fires break out.
00:07:09.740And then it turns out, you know, it's not climate change. It's actually arson.
00:07:14.600So we've got the story up there with some RCMP-supplied video of the kids setting the fire.
00:07:21.160The fire itself is now within 16 kilometers of Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories.
00:07:29.260So things there are tense, and, you know, they're praying for some rain, but I don't think it's coming.
00:07:37.580Also praying for rain are the people down near Pincher Creek.
00:07:41.180That area is the latest in Alberta to be declared a disaster area for the crops because of the lack of rain.
00:07:51.160We've got a story from our business expert, Sean Polzer, on how the influx of people moving here from other places in Canada has kept the Calgary housing market booming.
00:08:08.220House prices in Vancouver and Toronto compared to Calgary. Calgary is about half the price.
00:08:14.520And we've got a story on, if you remember, Corey, during the pandemic, the Liberals had all these ventilators stored away, spent like hundreds of millions of dollars on them, never used.
00:08:26.480Well, now apparently a lot of them have been given to the Ukraine to help in their war effort.
00:08:32.820So that's what we've got up now. Coming up shortly, we've got a former NBA player musing about throwing on a wig and joining the Women's League, as men are doing a lot of women's sports these days to try and mock gender.
00:08:48.820And he figures he could score 60 points a game in the Women's League.
00:08:53.440And he's seven foot tall, Corey, so I wouldn't put it past him.
00:08:57.480And Mr. Polzer's got a story coming up on Germany, desperate for natural gas, buying it from other places in the world.
00:09:05.440Because as Prime Minister Trudeau said, no business market here for it, Corey. None at all.
00:09:11.020Wonderful. Well, I guess one bright side, maybe the WNBA will finally get a little bit of a bump in its ratings.
00:09:18.580Yeah, they're not very good. And hey, speaking of women's sports, shout out to the English women's soccer team made the final.
00:09:27.340It's England's first World Cup final since 1966. So we're all going to have to get up early Sunday morning in the middle of the night and watch that game.
00:09:35.220I look forward to you telling me how it went.
00:10:42.100We don't have to let the government dictate how media is going to work in this new and changing world with things.
00:10:48.540And yeah, we cover some fun and interesting stories. That NBA one's interesting.
00:10:52.840We saw that in Canada recently with, I guess it was a female power lifter or, you know, a former male power.
00:11:00.160I can't keep up with the terms anymore.
00:11:03.440You know, I know trans doesn't bother me. I'm not as hung up on it with some other people.
00:11:07.160Hey, if that's your thing, good for you. Right on.
00:11:09.140I will certainly refer to anybody by whatever gender pronouns they prefer once they've told me or whatever, things like that.
00:11:14.380But we can't keep trying to deny physiological realities. That's where the problem hits.
00:11:21.040We can't pretend that there's not a physiological advantage when somebody's entering women's sports if they were initially biologically a male.
00:11:30.780There's just no pretending. You know, they're asking us to set aside reality.
00:11:36.020And it's unfair. It's unfair to the women who trained so hard, who put that time in to try and compete.
00:11:42.700You know, we see that in the swimming and now we're seeing with power lifting, of course.
00:11:47.220I don't know. Reality's got to sink in.
00:11:49.400And the thing is, what it does is it sparks up with the absurdity when you the activists push into areas like that is the backlash ends up hitting other people who just want to live their lives and move on.
00:11:59.660You know, it adds to the division and actually generates some of the hate because there are some hateful people out there.
00:12:04.420But it's just getting ridiculous. So maybe, though, you know, I'm sure it's a bit tongue in cheek.
00:12:10.040But if an NBA individual is talking about popping into the WNBA and taking part, well, maybe it helps expose a little bit of just, you know, how stupid it's getting, guys.
00:12:21.380I'm not seeing any people who are born biologically female trying to get into the NFL.
00:12:25.820For some reason, it just doesn't seem to work out, even though apparently biologically they're the same.
00:12:29.860It doesn't seem to happen. All right. We get those stories.
00:12:33.220The other one is, yeah, with Yellowknife, you know, and Arthur Green was covering that.
00:12:36.680He's always covering a lot of stuff up in Edmonton and our other stuff.
00:12:40.280We're seeing that a lot. We're seeing that these fires, yes, they're unusual this year.
00:12:43.680They're high. But what's also high is once they investigate the amount that were set by people.
00:12:48.880And the legacy media is jumping all over Premier Smith because she wouldn't jump on the global warming bandwagon with it.
00:12:54.200She pointed out that we've got an arson problem and we do.
00:12:57.480Ooh, we found that in Yellowknife. Yes, here, yet again, more arsonists behind it.
00:13:03.180Now, the bush is tender dry and we are in the midst of a bad drought throughout the West right now.
00:13:09.540So, I mean, it's going to burn harder and hotter and we can debate the rationale behind it.
00:13:13.840But it's not spontaneous combustion, guys.
00:13:17.080We've had people getting behind it. The earth isn't boiling.
00:13:20.820But it is hot right now. Don't light fires in the trees.
00:13:23.980So, either way, I hope for the best for people.
00:13:26.880But, you know, we will report on those things even if legacy media doesn't want to talk about it because those are the facts.
00:13:32.060And those are press conferences. That wasn't a theory coming out of Yellowknife.
00:13:35.200I saw that. That was a press conference from the RCMP in Yellowknife.
00:13:38.880Yes, they'd arrested four guys for lighting the fires up there.
00:13:41.360So, let's just point to where the problems really are.
00:13:46.400Speaking of problems, speaking of stupid. I love speaking of stupid.
00:13:49.100It's one of my favorite subjects and there's never a short pool to draw from when it comes to our federal government.
00:13:55.540So, Export Development Canada. I saw this gem. This is beautiful.
00:13:58.380So, they are unsure of recovering millions it loaned for aircraft engines to a Mexican airline.
00:14:07.480So, a startup little domestic airline in Mexico, I guess they wanted to get some airplanes.
00:14:14.040They needed the engines. So, what do we do?
00:14:15.920They gave our Canadian tax dollars to this Mexican airline.
00:14:20.280Said, here, we'll lend you that because, you know, we know that your credit risk is low, right?
00:14:24.480And you can run that great Mexican airline business.
00:14:27.680There's no corruption or incompetence in Mexico.
00:14:29.940You know, that doesn't happen down there.
00:14:31.580Well, lo and behold, they've gone broke.
00:14:33.400Now, why would they take millions of Canadian tax dollars, and they still haven't disclosed how many,
00:14:37.900and give them to a Mexican airline startup?
00:14:40.940Well, of course, all roads always lead to Quebec when it comes to business subsidies.
00:14:44.240It was Pratt & Whitney that was manufacturing these engines, which is based, of course, in Quebec.
00:14:52.100So, it's not enough just to take our money from productive regions, such as Alberta, Saskatchewan,
00:14:58.300and dump it into Quebec, the unproductive, the parasites of the country,
00:15:01.840and into things like Bombardier and Pratt & Whitney.
00:15:05.220It's not enough just to give the money to those companies,
00:15:07.280because even with all those subsidies, obviously their products are crap,
00:15:10.300because the only way we can get people to buy them is to give them the money to buy our products.
00:22:15.100The timing is about right, actually, if you're going to do it.
00:22:17.980Because that gives two years, roughly, if you were going to hopefully maintain the Liberal government that long.
00:22:22.660That gives one year, and that's how long these things take almost, you know, around now, or the better part of one, for them to have a leadership race, find and get whoever they want to have as a leader.
00:22:32.440And it gives them a year to try and establish themselves before they have to go to the pools.
00:22:36.920Because if he waits too long, then at that point, then, yeah, they don't have the timeline to do it.
00:22:40.820And he's going to be in there for the end.
00:22:42.040So right now would be the time when he'd be considering stepping back and getting somebody else in there.
00:24:12.840I mean, I don't think many people can look at that and say, no, you know, the rights weren't breached with the travel restrictions and things like that.
00:24:18.520The question is whether it was a justifiable breach.
00:24:21.860But what gets me now is the government saying, well, now, you know, this is all over.
00:24:27.240And this is what the judge herself said.
00:25:40.960I mean, again, I'm not as far over with some of the people with some of the thoughts they had on it as to why vaccines were what or what the pandemic was.
00:25:49.600But clearly, the government did mislead a lot of people.
00:34:29.060And people are fleeing the country to get care elsewhere.
00:34:32.380One of the things I had, I believe it was when I had Colin Craig on, he talked about a lot of Canadian doctors
00:34:37.840and health care professionals have been leaving Canada.
00:34:40.360They're setting up shop in other countries.
00:34:41.860So Canadian people are taking their dollars, leaving the country and getting Canadian practitioners to work on them outside of the country where they're allowed to pay for it.
00:34:51.240Nobody's saying, not many, I'm sure not saying, nobody, you know, because that's where the conversation always goes.
00:35:59.840Well, put you in the right mood for our chat.
00:36:01.520You know, we still got 10 minutes here.
00:36:04.460So you're with the Canadians for Affordable Energy.
00:36:06.740And, boy, you've got to have a busy, busy time.
00:36:09.660I mean, you're very outspoken on social media.
00:36:11.580But, you know, energy costs, I mean, inflation in general, and, of course, energy costs impact all of it all the way down the line, are pressuring everybody.
00:36:20.740But our government, I guess I'll just kind of start you there, seems to want to do nothing more than make things even more expensive for us.
00:36:27.740More expensive and more confrontational in being expensive.
00:36:30.700They're driven by an ideology, an ideology that basically says energy can be any price.
00:36:35.840Canadians will go along with it as long as you can contrive and connive and tell them that the world is coming to an end.
00:36:42.280I mean, I won't get into the science of this all, but the economics clearly indicates there's a big problem in this country.
00:36:47.820You have a government that's allowed energy prices to go through the roof two ways.
00:36:52.460There are green policies on carbon taxes, which, Corey, you've talked about many, many times.
00:36:56.720And the second that's not discussed as much is the blocking of pipelines and regulations, which is discouraging investments leaving the country.
00:37:03.120And with it, a drop in the Canadian dollar, which is only worth 130, 135 pennies to buy one U.S. dollar.
00:37:09.460Corey, that adds significantly to the price of everything in terms of gasoline in your province, about 26 cents a litre.
00:37:16.560My province, 28 in the Maritimes with a 15 percent HST, more like 30.
00:37:21.620These are real factors driving the cost of living through the roof.
00:37:27.040Yes, and you can talk about monetary policy and the government overspending and printing too much money and all these other things.
00:37:33.700But we keep tap dancing around what is, in my view, the elephant in the room.
00:37:38.320Even the Bank of Canada has to recognize now, finally, after two terms of saying gasoline is, in fact, driving inflation up and down.
00:37:47.180When it's down, of course, the Liberals take credit for it.
00:37:49.260When it's up, they're conspicuously silent, as we saw today, or I should say yesterday, when an announcement came that, in fact, inflation is up again.
00:37:56.000The reality is this is a country blessed with an abundance of energy, and we are despoiling and ruining it for generations and undermining not just affordability, but I think the benefit and the gift that has been given to every Canadian of energy resources the world desperately wants, but which we have a few ideologues in Ottawa preventing it from happening.
00:38:14.060Yeah, I mean, we are an energy powerhouse, or we should be.
00:38:17.680I mean, the natural resources we're blessed with, whether it is the hydro in the east or the natural gas and oil we have in the west, but we have an ideologically driven federal government that doesn't want us to export it even.
00:38:28.640I mean, not even talking about our domestic, you know, use of this, because it's kind of ridiculous that we have so many energy resources.
00:38:34.640We pay such a high domestic price, but we have a prime minister telling us there's no business case to export it to other countries.
00:38:40.800And then lying, as his Minister of Environment has done on many occasions, saying, you know, these are industries that are making tons of profit, let them pay their fair share rather than passing it on to consumers.
00:38:53.560Maybe he's dangled in a few too many buildings and bridges and whatnot, but the reality is for most of us who have spent a bit of time in politics, some of us in the real private sector, in the real world, and those of us trying to struggle to make ends meet.
00:39:05.300You know, I don't come from a family of great wealth.
00:39:08.400My parents both lost their shirts back in the 1980s when the last Trudeau government spent so heavily that we wound up with 23, 24% interest rates.
00:39:16.440I think the country is going down that road again.
00:39:18.900And when you have leaders in this country who are determined not just to impose something they know cannot work.
00:39:24.680Germany has proven that renewables do not work.
00:39:27.860You know, France is having trouble having to, you know, look back at coal.
00:39:35.060It wants to now get back into permitting leases to get natural gas.
00:39:39.400Canada has all of these advantages, and yet we have a group of people in Ottawa, elites, committed to shutting down the country's resources, and as a result and as a consequence, shutting down our economy.
00:39:51.600It's only a matter of time before another bond rating agency comes in, downgrades our credit.
00:39:55.880And if you think, you know, 6% or 7% interest rates are tough to handle, wait until that happens and you have to pay 10% or 11%.
00:40:02.480Then I think things will get very real.
00:40:04.260And those here, my neck in the woods in Toronto, who live in, you know, fantasy world and believe their food is delivered by stork or by, you know, by pixie dust, will now have to get more real about the direction taken.
00:40:15.860It's a very deliberate policy by this government to undermine the Canadian economy by throwing out everything that's good in favor of things they know did not work.
00:40:22.440So, I mean, I believe citizens are catching on.
00:42:28.800Overnight in Nova Scotia, when you saw a 30, 40 cent a litre increase hitting people who happen to be, you know, far less better off than the rest of the country on average.
00:42:38.080When you start hitting them and impacting them and then saying, oh, here's a bit of, here's a couple of pennies to pay you back in terms of a rebate, which they know don't work.
00:42:47.100When you start hitting consumers, you start making people poor, you force them to make decisions that they are not comfortable with.
00:42:54.620I expect that the real blowback is going to come in provinces like Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, PEI, and Newfoundland.
00:42:59.860When on election night, when that should happen, and I think Liberals know this, they lose most of their seats in that region of the country.
00:43:04.480Then the rest of it will be a steamroll because I think here in Ontario, with some exceptions, I think we're going the same direction as well.
00:43:11.460Yeah, well, ideals and green dreams or even family loyalty to particular parties tends to go out the window if you can't make the rent or the mortgage payment or you're worried about getting your kids through school or even buying groceries for some people.
00:43:22.580So I could see a definite turnabout in the Atlantic provinces.
00:43:27.260I mean, especially it just made me cringe when you mentioned it.
00:43:29.760The amount of damage they could do in 25 more months, though, could be pretty excessive.
00:43:32.700It can, and I think Canadians have to know that, and they have to be more outspoken.
00:43:36.760You get a pollster calling, you tell them you're not happy, you're not going to support this particular coalition government.
00:43:41.720I think when it gets to 40% and 45% from the pure polytheft conservatives, I think we may very well see Mr. Trudeau take a long walk off a surfboard in Tofino somewhere.
00:43:51.940Yeah, I was speculating earlier that that might come pretty soon, but I mean, you know, when you look at the pool that this liberal party, I said it when I introduced before at the start of the show when you were coming on, I said, you know, you're a member from back in the days when liberals were pragmatic and sane.
00:44:06.760Now it's a party dominated by ideologues.
00:44:09.080I don't know where or who they might draw for a leadership that might turn things around, but I guess we could hope.
00:44:15.700I mean, there's still people out there that might turn that party around a bit.
00:44:21.540The damage is done, and I think at this point it's trying to protect the 70 or 90 or 100 members you think you can keep by having a transition at the leadership level.
00:44:31.140But if you're going to keep on the same dangerous path to economic perdition, good luck with that.
00:44:37.480You might be reduced to a rump, the same which I saw in 2011.
00:44:41.400There's significant consequences and blowback coming.
00:44:45.580Every time there's an interest rate increase, more and more people's noses go on the proverbial waterline.
00:44:50.780Food prices are endemically inflationary, driven by energy prices to a large extent, which this federal government seems to be committed insanely at trying to raise.
00:44:59.740We should be pulling back, removing those carbon taxes, hitting net zero hard and saying, if we can achieve it scientifically, fine.
00:45:07.880If not, scrap it, because it's an idea that is extraordinarily pernicious to Canada and is likely to lead not just to economic dislocation, but potentially to a constitutional crisis on a scale I haven't seen in my lifetime.